Scenarios like this aren't only confusing. They're exhausting. But the real villain isn’t men, women, or some culture war issue—it’s dating apps.
More than 350 million people worldwide now use dating apps, generating over $6 billion annually. Yet users are faring worse by almost every psychological measure. A 2025 U.K. cohort study found that dating app use was associated with greater loneliness, while general social media showed no such effect. Many studies have linked dating app use to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress.
As a clinical psychiatrist, I have personally determined that dating apps can create an environment that accentuates insecurity and may stifle secure relationship building.
The issue is that people often get their signals crossed. Hot-and-cold behavior can activate our attachment systems, creating longing and urgency. This is typically misread as passion. The frequent checking of notifications, replaying every interaction, and searching social media for clues. None of that is love. That is a nervous system trying to resolve a perceived threat. Many daters interpret this intense experience as passion.
These interactions take a psychological toll. Research shows that when we feel ignored or excluded, it affects us at our core. We experience lower self-esteem, feel less in control of our lives, and perceive life as less meaningful. The day-to-day reality of app-based dating, engaged one day and silent the next, quietly reshapes our most fundamental sense of ourselves and the world around us.
Our culture reinforces the problem. Dating advice promotes “playing it cool” and strategic ambiguity, behaviors that run counter to what actually builds secure relationships. The available, direct person who gets written off as “not exciting” is often the best possible partner. Rejected for exactly the qualities that make them so.
Adjusting to the dating app era
In my clinical work, I’ve developed an approach based on neuroscience and attachment that focuses less on analyzing the past and more on building security in real time. Central to this is learning what I call the five pillars of secure mode: consistency, availability, responsiveness, reliability, and predictability.
Ten years, two kids, and a marriage later, he has.
To be clear, I am not arguing that dating apps have ruined love. Many people meet on apps like Hinge and build something wonderful. But for the large number of people who are dating and feeling worse, the problem is not a personal failing. It is an environment built to maximize scrolling, not security.
Secure dating is built in small, consistent moments from day one, preventing ambiguity from becoming the norm. The shift is not to abandon dating, but to approach it from a secure stance: prioritize clarity over uncertainty. Let intensity grow from meaningful connection, rather than from the ups and downs of insecure relating.
We can create our own secure dating culture and, by doing so, increase the chances of long-term relationship satisfaction. For the hopeless romantic that I am, dating this way isn’t just about making it more tolerable in the present. It’s about choosing someone who shows up consistently. That’s the kind of connection most likely to last.
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